12 March 2015

Pedigree

Archery.
Tapestry weaving. Playing the lute. Invading England. There
were all kinds of things you could do to pass the time in medieval France.

Another
popular pastime was genealogy, the study of heritage and descent. Seemingly, the nobility of the day liked nothing more than drawing elaborate tree
diagrams to boast both in print and in picture of their family’s proud French heritage.

Some
of these diagrams comprised little more than lists of names connected by a series of hand-drawn strokes and lines. Others, like the one above, were more involved and more detailed. And somewere even drawn as
actual trees. But
no matter how they were put together, there was something about the lines on these
genealogical diagrams—long, flat and broad, with shorter vertical strokes
linking one generation to the next—that reminded the writers and artists who produced them
of birds’ feet. And, in particular, of cranes’ feet.

Today, in modern French, “crane’s feet” is pieds de
grues. But back in the eleventh century, it would have been something more like pée de grue. And if that
particular snippet of obscure medieval French sounds even slightly familiar, then it’s because
pée de grue eventually morphed into our word pedigree—namely, the traceable
ancestry or descent of something.